Most of the top performing action recognition methods use optical flow as a "black box" input. Here we take a deeper look at the combination of flow and action recognition, and investigate why optical flow is helpful, what makes a flow method good for action recognition, and how we can make it better. In particular, we investigate the impact of different flow algorithms and input transformations to better understand how these affect a state-of-the-art action recognition method. Furthermore, we fine tune two neural-network flow methods end-to-end on the most widely used action recognition dataset (UCF101). Based on these experiments, we make the following five observations: 1) optical flow is useful for action recognition because it is invariant to appearance, 2) optical flow methods are optimized to minimize end-point-error (EPE), but the EPE of current methods is not well correlated with action recognition performance, 3) for the flow methods tested, accuracy at boundaries and at small displacements is most correlated with action recognition performance, 4) training optical flow to minimize classification error instead of minimizing EPE improves recognition performance, and 5) optical flow learned for the task of action recognition differs from traditional optical flow especially inside the human body and at the boundary of the body. These observations may encourage optical flow researchers to look beyond EPE as a goal and guide action recognition researchers to seek better motion cues, leading to a tighter integration of the optical flow and action recognition communities.

The difficulty of annotating training data is a major obstacle to using CNNs for low-level tasks in video. Synthetic data often does not generalize to real videos, while unsupervised methods require heuristic n losses. Proxy tasks can overcome these issues, and start by training a network for a task for which annotation is easier or which can be trained unsupervised. The trained network is then fine-tuned for the original task using small amounts of ground truth data. Here, we investigate frame interpolation
as a proxy task for optical flow. Using real movies, we train a CNN unsupervised for temporal interpolation. Such a network implicitly estimates motion, but cannot handle untextured regions. By fine-tuning on small amounts of ground truth flow, the network can learn to fill in homogeneous regions and compute full optical flow fields. Using this unsupervised pre-training, our network outperforms similar architectures that were trained supervised using synthetic optical flow.

In Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), pages: 269, BMVA Press, September 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Parsing continuous human motion into meaningful segments plays an essential role in various applications. In this work, we propose a hierarchical dynamic clustering framework to derive action clusters from a sequence of local features in an unsuper- vised bottom-up manner. We systematically investigate the modules in this framework and particularly propose diverse temporal pooling schemes, in order to realize accurate temporal action localization. We demonstrate our method on two motion parsing tasks: temporal action segmentation and abnormal behavior detection. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework is significantly more effective than the other related state-of-the-art methods on several datasets.

Learned 3D representations of human faces are useful for computer vision problems such as 3D face tracking and reconstruction from images, as well as graphics applications such as character generation and animation. Traditional models learn a latent representation of a face using linear subspaces or higher-order tensor generalizations. Due to this linearity, they can not capture extreme deformations and non-linear expressions. To address this, we introduce a versatile model that learns a non-linear representation of a face using spectral convolutions on a mesh surface. We introduce mesh sampling operations that enable a hierarchical mesh representation that captures non-linear variations in shape and expression at multiple scales within the model. In a variational setting, our model samples diverse realistic 3D faces from a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Our training data consists of 20,466 meshes of extreme expressions captured over 12 different subjects. Despite limited training data, our trained model outperforms state-of-the-art face models with 50% lower reconstruction error, while using 75% fewer parameters. We also show that, replacing the expression space of an existing state-of-the-art face model with our autoencoder, achieves a lower reconstruction error. Our data, model and code are available at http://coma.is.tue.mpg.de/.

Comparing the appearance of corresponding body parts is essential for person re-identification. However, body parts are frequently misaligned be- tween detected boxes, due to the detection errors and the pose/viewpoint changes. In this paper, we propose a network that learns a part-aligned representation for person re-identification. Our model consists of a two-stream network, which gen- erates appearance and body part feature maps respectively, and a bilinear-pooling layer that fuses two feature maps to an image descriptor. We show that it results in a compact descriptor, where the inner product between two image descriptors is equivalent to an aggregation of the local appearance similarities of the cor- responding body parts, and thereby significantly reduces the part misalignment problem. Our approach is advantageous over other pose-guided representations by learning part descriptors optimal for person re-identification. Training the net- work does not require any part annotation on the person re-identification dataset. Instead, we simply initialize the part sub-stream using a pre-trained sub-network of an existing pose estimation network and train the whole network to minimize the re-identification loss. We validate the effectiveness of our approach by demon- strating its superiority over the state-of-the-art methods on the standard bench- mark datasets including Market-1501, CUHK03, CUHK01 and DukeMTMC, and standard video dataset MARS.

In 29th British Machine Vision Conference, September 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

The optical flow of humans is well known to be useful for the analysis of human action. Given this, we devise an optical flow algorithm specifically for human motion and show that it is superior to generic flow methods. Designing a method by hand is impractical, so we develop a new training database of image sequences with ground truth optical flow. For this we use a 3D model of the human body and motion capture data to synthesize realistic flow fields. We then train a convolutional neural network to estimate human flow fields from pairs of images. Since many applications in human motion analysis depend on speed, and we anticipate mobile applications, we base our method on SpyNet with several modifications. We demonstrate that our trained network is more accurate than a wide range of top methods on held-out test data and that it generalizes well to real image sequences. When combined with a person detector/tracker, the approach provides a full solution to the problem of 2D human flow estimation. Both the code and the dataset are available for research.

Direct prediction of 3D body pose and shape remains a challenge even for highly parameterized deep learning models. Mapping from the 2D image space to the prediction space is difficult: perspective ambiguities make the loss function noisy and training data is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel approach (Neural Body Fitting (NBF)). It integrates a statistical body model within a CNN, leveraging reliable bottom-up semantic body part segmentation and robust top-down body model constraints. NBF is fully differentiable and can be trained using 2D and 3D annotations. In detailed experiments, we analyze how the components of our model affect performance, especially the use of part segmentations as an explicit intermediate representation, and present a robust, efficiently trainable framework for 3D human pose estimation from 2D images with competitive results on standard benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/mohomran/neural_body_fitting

Infant motion analysis enables early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders like cerebral palsy (CP). Diagnosis, however, is challenging, requiring expert human judgement. An automated solution would be beneficial but requires the accurate capture of 3D full-body movements. To that end, we develop a non-intrusive, low-cost, lightweight acquisition system that captures the shape and motion of infants. Going beyond work on modeling adult body shape, we learn a 3D Skinned Multi-Infant Linear body model (SMIL) from noisy, low-quality, and incomplete RGB-D data. We demonstrate the capture of shape and motion with 37 infants in a clinical environment. Quantitative experiments show that SMIL faithfully represents the data and properly factorizes the shape and pose of the infants. With a case study based on general movement assessment (GMA), we demonstrate that SMIL captures enough information to allow medical assessment. SMIL provides a new tool and a step towards a fully automatic system for GMA.

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September 2018 (conference)

Abstract

Modern deep learning systems successfully solve many perception tasks such as object pose estimation when the input image is of high quality. However, in challenging imaging conditions such as on low resolution images or when the image is corrupted by imaging artifacts, current systems degrade considerably in accuracy. While a loss in performance is unavoidable we would like our models to quantify their uncertainty in order to achieve robustness against images of varying quality. Probabilistic deep learning models combine the expressive power of deep learning with uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic deep learning model for the task of angular regression. Our model uses von Mises distributions to predict a distribution over object pose angle.
Whereas a single von Mises distribution is making strong assumptions about the shape of the distribution, we extend the basic model to predict a mixture of von Mises distributions. We show how to learn a mixture model using a finite and infinite number of mixture components. Our model allow for likelihood-based training and efficient inference at test time. We demonstrate on a number of challenging pose estimation datasets that our model produces calibrated probability predictions and competitive or superior point estimates compared to the current state-of-the-art.

In this work, we propose a method that combines a single hand-held camera and a set of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) attached at the body limbs to estimate accurate 3D poses in the wild. This poses many new challenges: the moving camera, heading drift, cluttered background, occlusions and many people visible in the video. We associate 2D pose detections in each image to the corresponding IMU-equipped persons by solving a novel graph based optimization problem that forces 3D to 2D coherency within a frame and across long range frames. Given associations, we jointly optimize the pose of a statistical body model, the camera pose and heading drift using a continuous optimization framework. We validated our method on the TotalCapture dataset, which provides video and IMU synchronized with ground truth. We obtain an accuracy of 26mm, which makes it accurate enough to serve as a benchmark for image-based 3D pose estimation in the wild. Using our method, we recorded 3D Poses in the Wild (3DPW ), a new dataset consisting of more than 51; 000 frames with accurate
3D pose in challenging sequences, including walking in the city, going up-stairs, having coffee or taking the bus. We make the reconstructed 3D poses, video, IMU and 3D models available for research purposes at http://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/3DPW.

In this work, we consider the problem of decentralized multi-robot target tracking and obstacle avoidance in dynamic environments. Each robot executes a local motion planning algorithm which is based on model predictive control (MPC). The planner is designed as a quadratic program, subject to constraints on robot dynamics and obstacle avoidance. Repulsive potential field functions are employed to avoid obstacles. The novelty of our approach lies in embedding these non-linear potential field functions as constraints within a convex optimization framework. Our method convexifies nonconvex constraints and dependencies, by replacing them as pre-computed external input forces in robot dynamics. The proposed algorithm additionally incorporates different methods to avoid field local minima problems associated with using potential field functions in planning. The motion planner does not enforce predefined trajectories or any formation geometry on the robots and is a comprehensive solution for cooperative obstacle avoidance in the context of multi-robot target tracking. We perform simulation studies for different scenarios to showcase the convergence and efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

We describe Human Mesh Recovery (HMR), an end-to-end framework for reconstructing a full 3D mesh of a human body from a single RGB image. In contrast to most current methods that compute 2D or 3D joint locations, we produce a richer and more useful mesh representation that is parameterized by shape and 3D joint angles. The main objective is to minimize the reprojection loss of keypoints, which allows our model to be trained using in-the-wild images that only have ground truth 2D annotations. However, the reprojection loss alone is highly underconstrained. In this work we address this problem by introducing an adversary trained to tell whether human body shape and pose parameters are real or not using a large database of 3D human meshes. We show that HMR can be trained with and without using any paired 2D-to-3D supervision. We do not rely on intermediate 2D keypoint detections and infer 3D pose and shape parameters directly from image pixels. Our model runs in real-time given a bounding box containing the person. We demonstrate our approach on various images in-the-wild and out-perform previous optimization-based methods that output 3D meshes and show competitive results on tasks such as 3D joint location estimation and part segmentation.

Animals are widespread in nature and the analysis of their shape and motion is important in many fields and industries. Modeling 3D animal shape, however, is difficult because the 3D scanning methods used to capture human shape are not applicable to wild animals or natural settings. Consequently, we propose a method to capture the detailed 3D shape of animals from images alone. The articulated and deformable nature of animals makes this problem extremely challenging, particularly in unconstrained environments with moving and uncalibrated cameras. To make this possible, we use a strong prior model of articulated animal shape that we fit to the image data. We then deform the animal shape in a canonical reference pose such that it matches image evidence when articulated and projected into multiple images. Our method extracts significantly more 3D shape detail than previous methods and is able to model new species, including the shape of an extinct animal, using only a few video frames. Additionally, the projected 3D shapes are accurate enough to facilitate the extraction of a realistic texture map from multiple frames.

Most state-of-the-art methods for action recognition rely on a two-stream architecture that processes appearance and motion independently. In this paper, we claim that consider- ing them jointly offers rich information for action recogni- tion. We introduce a novel representation that gracefully en- codes the movement of some semantic keypoints. We use the human joints as these keypoints and term our Pose moTion representation PoTion. Specifically, we first run a state- of-the-art human pose estimator [4] and extract heatmaps for the human joints in each frame. We obtain our PoTion representation by temporally aggregating these probability maps. This is achieved by ‘colorizing’ each of them de- pending on the relative time of the frames in the video clip and summing them. This fixed-size representation for an en- tire video clip is suitable to classify actions using a shallow convolutional neural network. Our experimental evaluation shows that PoTion outper- forms other state-of-the-art pose representations [6, 48]. Furthermore, it is complementary to standard appearance and motion streams. When combining PoTion with the recent two-stream I3D approach [5], we obtain state-of- the-art performance on the JHMDB, HMDB and UCF101 datasets.

2014

Hough-based voting approaches have been successfully applied to object detection. While these methods can be efficiently implemented by random forests, they estimate the probability for an object hypothesis for each feature independently. In this work, we address this problem by grouping features in a local neighborhood to obtain a better estimate of the probability. To this end, we propose oblique classification-regression forests that combine features of different trees. We further investigate the benefit of combining independent and grouped features and evaluate the approach on RGB and RGB-D datasets.

This paper proposes a method for high-quality omnidirectional 3D reconstruction of augmented Manhattan worlds from catadioptric stereo video sequences. In contrast to existing works we do not rely on constructing virtual perspective views, but instead propose to optimize depth jointly in a unified omnidirectional space. Furthermore, we show that plane-based prior models can be applied even though planes in 3D do not project to planes in the omnidirectional domain. Towards this goal, we propose an omnidirectional slanted-plane Markov random field model which relies on plane hypotheses extracted using a novel voting scheme for 3D planes in omnidirectional space. To quantitatively evaluate our method we introduce a dataset which we have captured using our autonomous driving platform AnnieWAY which we equipped with two horizontally aligned catadioptric cameras and a Velodyne HDL-64E laser scanner for precise ground truth depth measurements. As evidenced by our experiments, the proposed method clearly benefits from the unified view and significantly outperforms existing stereo matching techniques both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, our method is able to reduce noise and the obtained depth maps can be represented very compactly by a small number of image segments and plane parameters.

This paper describes an approach to reconstruct the complete history of a 3-d scene over time from imagery. The proposed approach avoids rebuilding 3-d models of the scene at each time instant. Instead, the approach employs an initial 3-d model which is continuously updated with changes in the environment to form a full 4-d representation. This updating scheme is enabled by a novel algorithm that infers 3-d changes with respect to the model at one time step from images taken at a subsequent time step. This algorithm can effectively detect changes even when the illumination conditions between image collections are significantly different. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated on four challenging datasets in terms of 4-d modeling accuracy as well as quantitative evaluation of 3-d change detection.

This paper proposes a new formulation of the human pose estimation problem. We present the Fields of Parts model, a binary Conditional Random Field model designed to detect human body parts of articulated people in single images.
The Fields of Parts model is inspired by the idea of Pictorial Structures, it models local appearance and joint spatial configuration of the human body. However the underlying graph structure is entirely different. The idea is simple: we model the presence and absence of a body part at every possible position, orientation, and scale in an image with a binary random variable. This results into a vast number of random variables, however, we show that approximate inference in this model is efficient. Moreover we can encode the very same appearance and spatial structure as in Pictorial Structures models.
This approach allows us to combine ideas from segmentation and pose estimation into a single model. The Fields of Parts model can use evidence from the background, include local color information, and it is connected more densely than a kinematic chain structure. On the challenging Leeds Sports Poses dataset we improve over the Pictorial Structures counterpart by 5.5% in terms of Average Precision of Keypoints (APK).

Hand motion capture has been an active research topic in recent years, following the success of full-body pose tracking. Despite similarities, hand tracking proves to be more challenging, characterized by a higher dimensionality, severe occlusions and self-similarity between fingers.
For this reason, most approaches rely on strong assumptions, like hands in isolation or expensive multi-camera systems, that limit the practical use. In this work, we propose a framework for hand tracking that can capture the motion of two interacting hands using only a single, inexpensive RGB-D camera. Our approach combines a generative model with collision detection and discriminatively learned salient points. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on 14 new sequences with challenging interactions.

Inverse graphics attempts to take sensor data and infer 3D geometry, illumination, materials, and motions such that a graphics renderer could realistically reproduce the observed scene. Renderers, however, are designed to solve the forward process of image synthesis. To go in the other direction, we propose an approximate differentiable renderer (DR) that explicitly models the relationship between changes in model parameters and image observations. We describe a publicly available OpenDR framework that makes it easy to express a forward graphics model and then automatically obtain derivatives with respect to the model parameters and to optimize over them. Built on a new autodifferentiation package and OpenGL, OpenDR provides a local optimization method that can be incorporated into probabilistic programming frameworks. We demonstrate the power and simplicity of programming with OpenDR by using it to solve the problem of estimating human body shape from Kinect depth and RGB data.

In order to avoid an expensive manual labeling process or to learn object classes autonomously without human intervention, object discovery techniques have been proposed that extract visual similar objects from weakly labelled videos. However, the problem of discovering small or medium sized objects is largely unexplored. We observe that videos with activities involving human-object interactions can serve as weakly labelled data for such cases. Since neither object appearance nor motion is distinct enough to discover objects in these videos, we propose a framework that samples from a space of algorithms and their parameters to extract sequences of object proposals. Furthermore, we model similarity of objects based on appearance and functionality, which is derived from human and object motion. We show that functionality is an
important cue for discovering objects from activities and demonstrate the generality of the model on three challenging RGB-D and RGB datasets.

Predicting the time at which the integral over a stochastic process reaches a target level is a value of interest in many applications. Often, such computations have to be made at low cost, in real time. As an intuitive example that captures many features of this problem class, we choose progress bars, a ubiquitous element of computer user interfaces. These predictors are usually based on simple point estimators, with no error modelling. This leads to fluctuating behaviour confusing to the user. It also does not provide a distribution prediction (risk values), which are crucial for many other application areas. We construct and empirically evaluate a fast, constant cost algorithm using a Gauss-Markov process model which provides more information to the user.

Large motions remain a challenge for current optical flow algorithms. Traditionally, large motions are addressed using multi-resolution representations like Gaussian pyramids. To deal with large displacements, many pyramid levels are needed and, if an object is small, it may be invisible at the highest levels. To address this we decompose images using a channel representation (CR) and replace the standard brightness constancy assumption with a descriptor constancy assumption. CRs can be seen as an over-segmentation of the scene into layers based on some image feature. If the appearance of a foreground object differs from the background then its descriptor will be different and they will be represented in different layers.We create a pyramid by smoothing these layers, without mixing foreground and background or losing small objects. Our method estimates more accurate flow than the baseline on the MPI-Sintel benchmark, especially for fast motions and near motion boundaries.

Videos contain complex spatially-varying motion blur due to the combination of object motion, camera motion, and depth variation with finite shutter speeds. Existing methods to estimate optical flow, deblur the images, and segment the scene fail in such cases. In particular, boundaries between differently moving objects cause problems, because here the blurred images are a combination of the blurred appearances of multiple surfaces. We address this with a novel layered model of scenes in motion. From a motion-blurred video sequence, we jointly estimate the layer segmentation and each layer's appearance and motion. Since the blur is a function of the layer motion and segmentation, it is completely determined by our generative model. Given a video, we formulate the optimization problem as minimizing the pixel error between the blurred frames and images synthesized from the model, and solve it using gradient descent. We demonstrate our approach on synthetic and real sequences.

Intrinsic images such as albedo and shading are valuable for later stages of visual processing. Previous methods for extracting albedo and shading use either single images or images together with depth data. Instead, we define intrinsic video estimation as the problem of extracting temporally coherent albedo and shading from video alone. Our approach exploits the assumption that albedo is constant over time while shading changes slowly. Optical flow aids in the accurate estimation of intrinsic video by providing temporal continuity as well as putative surface boundaries. Additionally, we find that the estimated albedo sequence can be used to improve optical flow accuracy in sequences with changing illumination. The approach makes only weak assumptions about the scene and we show that it substantially outperforms existing single-frame intrinsic image methods. We evaluate this quantitatively on synthetic sequences as well on challenging natural sequences with complex geometry, motion, and illumination.

Detection of new or rapidly evolving melanocytic lesions is crucial for early diagnosis and treatment of melanoma.We propose a fully automated pre-screening system for detecting new lesions or changes in existing ones, on the order of 2 - 3mm, over almost the entire body surface. Our solution is based on a multi-camera 3D stereo system. The system captures 3D textured scans of a subject at different times and then brings these scans into correspondence by aligning them with a learned, parametric, non-rigid 3D body model. This means that captured skin textures are in accurate alignment across scans, facilitating the detection of new or changing lesions. The integration of lesion segmentation with a deformable 3D body model is a key contribution that makes our approach robust to changes in illumination and subject pose.

Most object tracking methods only exploit a single quantization of an image space: pixels, superpixels, or bounding boxes, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. It is highly unlikely that a common optimal quantization level, suitable for tracking all objects in all environments, exists. We therefore propose a hierarchical appearance representation model for tracking, based on a graphical model that exploits shared information across multiple quantization levels. The tracker aims to find the most possible position of the target by jointly classifying the pixels and superpixels and obtaining the best configuration across all levels. The motion of the bounding box is taken into consideration, while Online Random Forests are used to provide pixel- and superpixel-level quantizations and progressively updated on-the-fly. By appropriately considering the multilevel quantizations, our tracker exhibits not only excellent performance in non-rigid object deformation handling, but also its robustness to occlusions. A quantitative evaluation is conducted on two benchmark datasets: a non-rigid object tracking dataset (11 sequences) and the CVPR2013 tracking benchmark (50 sequences). Experimental results show that our tracker overcomes various tracking challenges and is superior to a number of other popular tracking methods.

New scanning technologies are increasing the importance of 3D mesh data and the need for algorithms that can reliably align it. Surface registration is important for building full 3D models from partial scans, creating statistical shape models, shape retrieval, and tracking. The problem is particularly challenging for non-rigid and articulated objects like human bodies. While the challenges of real-world data registration are not present in existing synthetic datasets, establishing ground-truth correspondences for real 3D scans is difficult. We address this with a novel mesh registration technique that combines 3D shape and appearance information to produce high-quality alignments. We define a new dataset called FAUST that contains 300 scans of 10 people in a wide range of poses together with an evaluation methodology. To achieve accurate registration, we paint the subjects with high-frequency textures
and use an extensive validation process to ensure accurate ground truth. We find that current shape registration methods have trouble with this real-world data. The dataset and evaluation website are available for research purposes at http://faust.is.tue.mpg.de.

We consider the intersection of two research fields: transfer learning and statistics on manifolds. In particular, we consider, for manifold-valued data, transfer learning of tangent-space models such as Gaussians distributions, PCA, regression, or classifiers. Though one would hope to simply use ordinary Rn-transfer learning ideas, the manifold structure prevents it. We overcome this by basing our method on inner-product-preserving parallel transport, a well-known tool widely used in other problems of statistics on manifolds in computer vision. At first, this straightforward idea seems to suffer from an obvious shortcoming: Transporting large datasets is prohibitively expensive, hindering scalability. Fortunately, with our approach, we never transport data. Rather, we show how the statistical models themselves can be transported, and prove that for the tangent-space models above, the transport “commutes” with learning. Consequently, our compact framework, applicable to a large class of manifolds, is not restricted by the size of either the training or test sets. We demonstrate the approach by transferring PCA and logistic-regression models of real-world data involving 3D shapes and image descriptors.

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2014, pages: 3143-3150, June 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We propose to frame the problem of marker-less robot arm pose estimation as a pixel-wise part classification problem. As input, we use a depth image in which each pixel is classified to be either from a particular robot part or the background. The classifier is a random decision forest trained on a large number of synthetically generated and labeled depth images. From all the training samples ending up at a leaf node, a set of offsets is learned that votes for relative joint positions. Pooling these votes over all foreground pixels and subsequent clustering gives us an estimate of the true joint positions. Due to the intrinsic parallelism of pixel-wise classification, this approach can run in super real-time and is more efficient than previous ICP-like methods. We quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of this approach on synthetic data. We also demonstrate that the method produces accurate joint estimates on real data despite being purely trained on synthetic data.

Dynamic Bayesian networks such as Hidden Markov
Models (HMMs) are successfully used as probabilistic models
for human motion. The use of hidden variables makes
them expressive models, but inference is only approximate
and requires procedures such as particle filters or Markov
chain Monte Carlo methods. In this work we propose to instead
use simple Markov models that only model observed
quantities. We retain a highly expressive dynamic model by
using interactions that are nonlinear and non-parametric.
A presentation of our approach in terms of latent variables
shows logarithmic growth for the computation of exact loglikelihoods
in the number of latent states. We validate
our model on human motion capture data and demonstrate
state-of-the-art performance on action recognition and motion
completion tasks.

As the collection of large datasets becomes increasingly automated, the occurrence of outliers will increase – "big data" implies "big outliers". While principal component analysis (PCA) is often used to reduce the size of data, and scalable solutions exist, it is well-known that outliers can arbitrarily corrupt the results. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art approaches for robust PCA do not scale beyond small-to-medium sized datasets. To address this, we introduce the Grassmann Average (GA), which expresses dimensionality reduction as an average of the subspaces spanned by the data. Because averages can be efficiently computed, we immediately gain scalability. GA is inherently more robust than PCA, but we show that they coincide for Gaussian data. We exploit that averages can be made robust to formulate the Robust Grassmann Average (RGA) as a form of robust PCA. Robustness can be with respect to vectors (subspaces) or elements of vectors; we focus on the latter and use a trimmed average. The resulting Trimmed Grassmann Average (TGA) is particularly appropriate for computer vision because it is robust to pixel outliers. The algorithm has low computational complexity and minimal memory requirements, making it scalable to "big noisy data." We demonstrate TGA for background modeling, video restoration, and shadow removal. We show scalability by performing robust PCA on the entire Star Wars IV movie.

We advocate the inference of qualitative information about 3D human
pose, called posebits, from images. Posebits represent boolean
geometric relationships between body parts
(e.g., left-leg in front of right-leg or hands close to each other).
The advantages of posebits as a mid-level representation are 1)
for many tasks of interest, such qualitative
pose information may be sufficient (e.g. , semantic image retrieval),
2) it is relatively easy to annotate large image corpora with posebits, as
it simply requires answers to yes/no questions; and 3) they help
resolve challenging pose ambiguities and therefore
facilitate the difficult talk of image-based 3D pose estimation.
We introduce posebits, a posebit database, a method for selecting useful
posebits for pose estimation and a structural SVM model for posebit inference.
Experiments show the use of posebits for semantic image
retrieval and for improving 3D pose estimation.

In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-14), 32(1):1152-1160, J. Machine Learning Research Workshop and Conf. and Proc., Beijing, China, June 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In applications of graphical models arising in domains such as computer vision and signal processing,
we often seek the most likely configurations of high-dimensional, continuous variables. We develop a particle-based max-product algorithm which maintains a diverse set of posterior mode hypotheses, and is robust to initialization.
At each iteration, the set of hypotheses at each node is augmented via stochastic proposals, and then reduced via an efficient selection algorithm. The integer program underlying our optimization-based particle selection minimizes
errors in subsequent max-product message updates. This objective automatically encourages diversity in the maintained hypotheses, without requiring tuning of application-specific distances among hypotheses. By avoiding the stochastic resampling steps underlying particle sum-product algorithms, we also avoid common degeneracies where particles collapse onto a single hypothesis. Our approach significantly outperforms previous particle-based algorithms in experiments focusing on the estimation of human pose from single images.

Non-central catadioptric models are able to cope with irregular camera setups and inaccuracies in the manufacturing process but are computationally demanding and thus not suitable for robotic applications. On the other hand, calibrating a quasi-central (almost central) system with a central model introduces errors due to a wrong relationship between the viewing ray orientations and the pixels on the image sensor. In this paper, we propose a central approximation to quasi-central catadioptric camera systems that is both accurate and efficient. We observe that the distance to points in 3D is typically large compared to deviations from the single viewpoint. Thus, we first calibrate the system using a state-of-the-art non-central camera model. Next, we show that by remapping the observations we are able to match the orientation of the viewing rays of a much simpler single viewpoint model with the true ray orientations. While our approximation is general and applicable to all quasi-central camera systems, we focus on one of the most common cases in practice: hypercatadioptric cameras. We compare our model to a variety of baselines in synthetic and real localization and motion estimation experiments. We show that by using the proposed model we are able to achieve near non-central accuracy while obtaining speed-ups of more than three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art non-central models.

We study a probabilistic numerical method for the solution of both
boundary and initial value problems that returns a joint Gaussian
process posterior over the solution. Such methods have concrete value
in the statistics on Riemannian manifolds, where non-analytic ordinary
differential equations are involved in virtually all computations. The
probabilistic formulation permits marginalising the uncertainty of the
numerical solution such that statistics are less sensitive to
inaccuracies. This leads to new Riemannian algorithms for mean value
computations and principal geodesic analysis. Marginalisation also
means results can be less precise than point estimates, enabling a
noticeable speed-up over the state of the art. Our approach is an
argument for a wider point that uncertainty caused by numerical
calculations should be tracked throughout the pipeline of machine
learning algorithms.

International Conference on Learning Representations, April 2014 (conference)

Abstract

While the majority of today's object class models provide only 2D bounding boxes, far richer output hypotheses are desirable including viewpoint, fine-grained category, and 3D geometry estimate. However, models trained to provide richer output require larger amounts of training data, preferably well covering the relevant aspects such as viewpoint and fine-grained categories. In this paper, we address this issue from the perspective of transfer learning, and design an object class model that explicitly leverages correlations between visual features. Specifically, our model represents prior distributions over permissible multi-view detectors in a parametric way -- the priors are learned once from training data of a source object class, and can later be used to facilitate the learning of a detector for a target class. As we show in our experiments, this transfer is not only beneficial for detectors based on basic-level category representations, but also enables the robust learning of detectors that represent classes at finer levels of granularity, where training data is typically even scarcer and more unbalanced. As a result, we report largely improved performance in simultaneous 2D object localization and viewpoint estimation on a recent dataset of challenging street scenes.

Factorization methods for computation of nonrigid structure have limited practicality, and work well only when there is large enough camera motion between frames, with long sequences and limited or no occlusions. We show that typical nonrigid structure can often be approximated well as locally rigid sub-structures in time and space. Specifically, we assume that: 1) the structure can be approximated as rigid in a short local time window and 2) some point pairs stay relatively rigid in space, maintaining a fixed distance between them during the sequence. We first use the triangulation constraints in rigid SFM over a sliding time window to get an initial estimate of the nonrigid 3D structure. We then automatically identify relatively rigid point pairs in this structure, and use their length-constancy simultaneously with triangulation constraints to refine the structure estimate. Unlike factorization methods, the structure is estimated independent of the camera motion computation, adding to the simplicity and stability of the approach. Further,
local factorization inherently handles significant natural occlusions gracefully, performing much better than the state-of-the art. We show more stable and accurate results as compared to the state-of-the art on even short sequences starting from 15 frames only, containing camera rotations
as small as 2 degree and up to 50% missing data.

Extracting anthropometric or tailoring measurements from 3D human body scans is important for applications such as virtual try-on, custom clothing, and online sizing. Existing commercial solutions identify anatomical landmarks on high-resolution 3D scans and then compute distances or circumferences on the scan. Landmark detection is sensitive to acquisition noise (e.g. holes) and these methods require subjects to adopt a specific pose. In contrast, we propose a solution we call model-based anthropometry. We fit a deformable 3D body model to scan data in one or more poses; this model-based fitting is robust to scan noise. This brings the scan into registration with a database of registered body scans. Then, we extract features from the registered model (rather than from the scan); these include, limb lengths, circumferences, and statistical features of global shape. Finally, we learn a mapping from these features to measurements using regularized linear regression. We perform an extensive evaluation using the CAESAR dataset and demonstrate that the accuracy of our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic estimation of the world surfaces from aerial images has seen much attention and progress in recent years. Among current modeling technologies, probabilistic volumetric models (PVMs) have evolved as an alternative representation that can learn geometry and appearance in a dense and probabilistic manner. Recent progress, in terms of storage and speed, achieved in the area of volumetric modeling, opens the opportunity to develop new frameworks that make use of the {PVM} to pursue the ultimate goal of creating an entire map of the earth, where one can reason about the semantics and dynamics of the 3-d world. Aligning 3-d models collected at different time-instances constitutes an important step for successful fusion of large spatio-temporal information. This paper evaluates how effectively probabilistic volumetric models can be aligned using robust feature-matching techniques, while considering different scenarios that reflect the kind of variability observed across aerial video collections from different time instances. More precisely, this work investigates variability in terms of discretization, resolution and sampling density, errors in the camera orientation, and changes in illumination and geographic characteristics. All results are given for large-scale, outdoor sites. In order to facilitate the comparison of the registration performance of {PVMs} to that of other 3-d reconstruction techniques, the registration pipeline is also carried out using Patch-based Multi-View Stereo (PMVS) algorithm. Registration performance is similar for scenes that have favorable geometry and the appearance characteristics necessary for high quality reconstruction. In scenes containing trees, such as a park, or many buildings, such as a city center, registration performance is significantly more accurate when using the PVM.

In Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Accurate and robust extraction of the left ventricle (LV) cavity is a key step for quantitative analysis of cardiac functions. In this study, we propose an improved LV cavity segmentation method that incorporates a dynamic shape constraint into the weighting function of the random walks algorithm. The method involves an iterative process that updates an intermediate result to the desired solution. The shape constraint restricts the solution space of the segmentation result, such that the robustness of the algorithm is increased to handle misleading information that emanates from noise, weak boundaries, and clutter. Our experiments on real cardiac magnetic resonance images demonstrate that the proposed method obtains better segmentation performance than standard method.

The 3D shape of the human body is useful for applications in fitness, games and apparel. Accurate body scanners, however, are expensive, limiting the availability of 3D body models. We present a method for human shape reconstruction from noisy monocular image and range data using a single inexpensive commodity sensor. The approach combines low-resolution image silhouettes with coarse range data to estimate a parametric model of the body. Accurate 3D shape estimates are obtained by combining multiple monocular views of a person moving in front of the sensor. To cope with varying body pose, we use a SCAPE body model which factors 3D body shape and pose variations. This enables the estimation of a single consistent shape while allowing pose to vary. Additionally, we describe a novel method to minimize the distance between the projected 3D body contour and the image silhouette that uses analytic derivatives of the objective function. We propose a simple method to estimate standard body measurements from the recovered SCAPE model and show that the accuracy of our method is competitive with commercial body scanning systems costing orders of magnitude more.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems